Thriller

Nine tracks in about forty-two minutes, and the record has no argument the parts are required by: it has a run of songs, each built to stand alone, and the test is whether each earns its place. Billie Jean, Beat It, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ and Human Nature do, each the strongest of its kind on the record and each hard to imagine it without. Thriller earns its place as the set piece, and The Lady in My Life closes in warmth. The test bites three times: The Girl Is Mine is a light duet whose tone breaks from everything around it, Baby Be Mine is competent with nothing of its own, and P.Y.T. restates the lighter mode. Held where it is because three of nine could go and the order could change without loss.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a self made public is besieged by what is said and claimed of it, and answers with denial and flight. Billie Jean carries it best: a man accused of fathering a child, the claim denied (“not my son”), the denial never quite convincing, over a bass line and hi-hat that sound like a pulse under watch. The sound carries the paranoia as fully as the words and is credited in full. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ sets gossip and pressure as a rush of rhythm; Beat It sets male violence and the courage to refuse it, while its guitar solo enacts the fight it counsels against. Held below the bar because much of the record is entertainment that discloses little, and the strongest disclosure is one song’s.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Elevation is real and comes in several forms, none at the very top. Billie Jean holds a taut, hypnotic height for its whole length, tension that never breaks. Human Nature has a floating, nocturnal beauty, the record’s gentlest height. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ rises in its last minutes into a chant, an ecstasy of rhythm. Beat It has force more than height, its guitar solo a shock of brilliance more than a summit, and Thriller is a pleasure of camp horror, its terror played for fun and lifted as theatre by Vincent Price’s passage. Baby Be Mine, The Girl Is Mine and P.Y.T. stay level, and The Lady in My Life is warm without rising far. Height on four of nine, the highest short of the medium’s summits.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is evoked, often well, and comes close to built in one place. Thriller summons the horror film’s monsters, the night and the grave, as costume: the archetype is played, not inhabited, and Vincent Price’s passage confirms the play. Beat It evokes the street fight and the gang. Billie Jean is where the pattern nearly bears weight: the dangerous woman and the accused man, an old pairing, carry the song’s tension, its particulars, a dance floor, a child and a claim, stay particular, and the singer, already a public figure, gives the denial a weight beyond the song. Held well below the bar because none of it is load-bearing across the record: no figure crosses the sequence, and there is no frame for the archetypes to hold up.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is the record’s own predecessor, Off the Wall (1979), made by the same singer and producer, and around it disco, funk, soul balladry and the rock of the radio. The turn is in the range: a Black pop singer places a hard-rock song with a famous guitarist’s solo beside funk, a horror novelty, a soft-rock ballad by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis and a duet with a Beatle, in one record aimed at every audience at once. That joining of segregated formats was a real move, and Beat It’s crossing into rock carried a stake. Held below the bar because the method was a proven path, the producer’s craft extended, and the wager was commercial: a swerve of breadth, not of direction.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows stays: its songs are separate objects, each sealed in its own arrangement, and played in another order or as singles they would know what they know now. Within songs, form carries real knowledge. Billie Jean’s form is its meaning: a groove that never resolves, a bass line circling under a voice that keeps denying, the tension structural. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ builds pressure by accumulation and releases it in the chant, and Thriller is a short horror film in sound, with its creak, its scream and its monologue. The sequence is counted here, once: it moves by tempo and mood, the second side the stronger run, and makes no argument. A form that enacts on two or three tracks and serves on the rest.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over forty-four years. The production is a standard text for engineers and producers: Billie Jean’s drum and bass sound, the layering of the voices and the placing of every part in Bruce Swedien’s mix are still taken apart and imitated. Writing on the record’s place in the racial history of radio and television, and on the persona it made, keeps returning to it. The yield in the recording is real: the arrangements reveal parts on close listening, the horn lines, the vocal percussion, the counter-rhythms of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, and Billie Jean deepens on return. Held where it is because the words yield what they state at once, most of the songs give on the hundredth hearing what they gave on the second, and much of the return is ritual.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is popular music of the early 1980s, divided by format and by race on radio and on the new music television. The intrinsic force reorganised less what a song could be than what a pop record could be for: a single object built to cross every format at once, made to a standard of production that became the industry’s, with Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ carrying a real force of rhythm and arrangement. The short films and the televised performance did much of the redirecting, and they are not the record; that share is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record set the model of the blockbuster album, singles drawn from it one after another for a year or more, carried a Black artist to the centre of every format, set the sound of pop production for a decade, and gave the dance floor its standards.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-four years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, remastered and expanded. Presence is as wide as any album’s of its age: the record is in print and in broadcast, its songs are played at parties and in public places, and Billie Jean and Beat It are known to people who have never owned it; popularity is credited as presence, not proof of permanence. Two charges hold it a tenth from the widest figure. The fabric: the synthesiser tones and drum programming of 1982 are on several tracks, and The Girl Is Mine and P.Y.T. sound of their year, though Billie Jean’s spareness has aged well. And the presence itself: since allegations against the artist were revived in 2019, part of it is contested.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing on most tracks. Quincy Jones’s production and Bruce Swedien’s engineering give every part its own space, and the record became a standard of pop sound. Michael Jackson’s voice is used across its range as instrument as much as speech: the hiccups and vocal percussion of Billie Jean, the falsetto of Human Nature, the shouted urgency of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, the layered self-harmonies everywhere. Billie Jean’s arrangement, bass line, hi-hat and strings entering late, is a model of economy; the horn arrangements are precise; Eddie Van Halen’s solo is placed as a shock. The faults fall on a share: The Girl Is Mine is saccharine, Baby Be Mine generic, and some synthesiser timbres are of the year.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs most of the record: a voice under pressure, running from what pursues it, set in a sound of total control. Billie Jean, the most paranoid track, obeys it fully; Thriller’s camp horror obeys it as play, pursuit made a party; Beat It obeys it as the street’s pressure, and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ as gossip closing in. The range is very wide, funk, hard rock, horror novelty, ballad, duet and soft rock, and the production holds it as one surface. Held where it is by the two most distant elements: Billie Jean and The Lady in My Life, the most tender track, are joined by the voice and the sheen rather than by the law, and The Girl Is Mine breaks it. A surface is not a law.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as pressure and paranoia, in Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. The couple is held in several keys: desire in P.Y.T. and Baby Be Mine, devotion in The Lady in My Life, a false claim in Billie Jean. The street and its violence enter in Beat It, the city and its night in Human Nature, and public life, gossip and fame, in Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. What holds the figure lowest on the page is the join: the orders arrive one song at a time and are joined by nothing deeper than the voice; the family is glimpsed only in a child claimed and denied; and the sacred, the state, labour, history and the natural order are absent.

Score: 7.0 / 10